Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

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Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...
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Old Man review – wilderness horror as cranky codger faces off with mysterious hiker

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Lucky McKee’s psychological horror starring Stephen Lang feels inauthentic and flat

Here is an unexceptional psychological horror from director Lucky McKee that feels dated and clunky, with some fairly ropey acting – or maybe that is down to the shaky lines put into the actors’ mouths. It only comes alive after a freaky plot twist at the end, but even that left the hairs on the back of my neck unprickled, the carpet under my feet unpulled.

Stephen Lang plays a cranky codger known only as Old Man who lives in the remote Smoky Mountains wilderness. The set design of his wooden cabin is distractingly inauthentic; it’s like an Ikea store display that has been done up in hicksville chic. Old Man has woken up in a filthy temper; first his dog, Rascal, pees on the floor, and then there is a knock at the door. Old Man shoves his shotgun into the face of the stranger standing outside. “Do as I say, or you’ll end up like her,” he growls, jabbing the gun at a stuffed wildcat on the wall.

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